[upofadown]

>"I'm all for 'don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence' but I don't believe Google is that incompetent.

They might be that indifferent though. If everyone in an organization knows that there are no repercussions to being incompatible with a particular entity, they will spend no time ensuring such compatibility. Entropy will do the rest.

Sometimes an anticompetitive situation can evolve without anyone taking an assertive action.

[yifanl]

I made this comment years ago, but selective indifference is still malicious.

[freedomben]

> selective indifference is still malicious

I don't think you can conclude that, at least not without playing with the definition of "malicious" which according to MW is "having or showing a desire to cause harm to someone."

If a typical engineer at Google, who is under the gun on schedule and needs to ship, prioritizes getting stuff working on Chrome which serves the vast majority of the market, and never ends up testing on FF (which may not even be installed on their machines), that's not the engineer "having a desire to cause harm to [mozilla]".

If you are arguing that the outcome is still the same, then I don't disagree, but even then still I think motivations matter for some things. Someone who accidentally hits a pedestrian and kills them is IMHO a different (and importantly different when it comes to meting out justice) situation vs a person intentionally aiming for and killing a pedestrian.

[acdha]

It’s not malice on behalf of that engineer. It is at the level of the managers who decided not to have adequate staffing, and who set the policy that unlike other companies they are willing to risk poor user experience to shift the browser market.

[glenstein]

>Sometimes an anticompetitive situation can evolve without anyone taking an assertive action

One example from TFA is checking a user agent and purposely adding a 5 second timer if it is not Chrome, which imo is hard to accidentally do.